Lawrence and the People He Meets

Reading D.H. Lawrence creates an experience that resembles the
experience of a kid who grew up with the black and white TV and has just
learned that they make color models, or the illiterate man observing all
the swirling beauty of Las Vegas, with none of its crass messages.
Lawrence can certainly observe with the best of them. And this can get
him in trouble. For example, let's look at the section in "The Spinner
and the Monks" where Lawrence meets the old spinner.

Her eyes were clear as the sky, blue, empyrean, transcendent. They were
clear, but they had no looking in them. Her face was like a sun-worn
stone...She saw merely a man's figure, a stranger, standing near. I was
a bit of the outside, negligible. She remained as she was, clear and
sustained like an old stone upon the hill-side.

And later:

To her I was a piece of the open environment. That was all. He world was
clear and absolute, without consciousness of self. She was not
self-conscious, because she was not aware that there was anything in the
universe except her universe. In her universe I was a stranger, a
foreign signore. That I had a world of my own, other than her own, was
not conceived by her. She did not care.

And still later:

She looked at me, as if suspiciously and derisively. Then, quite
suddenly, she started forward and went across the terrace to the great
blue-and-white checked cloth that was drying on the wall. I hesitated.
She had cut off consciousness from me. So I turned and ran away, taking
the steps two at a time, to get away from her. In a moment I was between
the walls, climbing upwards, hidden.

Lawrence lets his visual observations and very brief conversation with
this woman avalanche into huge assumptions about this woman's view of
the world and of him. This is like the mind of someone on hallucinogenic
drugs, even to the extent that it leads to a freak out of sorts (see
third paragraph). Lawrence's observations of his surroundings
continually spin out of control and create characters where stand men
and women. What do we as readers get from this technique? Are we to take
these created people as real representatives of a culture? Why does
Lawrence do this?